A telephone having a display screen, a telephone keypad, and a telephone handset is known, and it sometimes is referred to as a "screen phone". Companies such as Philips, VeriFone, Forval, U.S. Order, and SmartPhone Communications each provide such a telephone. These screen phones generally look like conventional telephones except they have the display screen which typically is located above the keypad. Some screen phones have an alphanumeric keyboard.
Known screen phones typically utilize a hardware architecture having three physically separate and discrete hardware modules: a general purpose microprocessor (and associated memory and logic) for executing application programs and/or controlling the other modules; a modem; and telephone electronics. Known screen phones typically use the keypad keys and/or dedicated function key buttons on the face of the phones to control the phones and select options presented on the display screen. Some known screen phones which use the ADSI protocol developed by Bellcore provide programmable "softkeys" on the display screen. The softkeys allow the fixed-position function key buttons to be programmably assigned a meaning.